9 - The Southernmost Revolution: The Río de la Plata in the Early Nineteenth Century

Summary

This chapter focuses in the collapse of the Spanish Empire in continental America in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, focusing on the viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata, which was replaced by four independent republics: Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay. The essay explains this outcome by integrating into a single narrative a political history that is quite often accounted for separately by each national historiography. It also stresses the revolutionary nature of this process: the creation of new states was only one of the novelties of the period, which witnessed major political, economic, and cultural changes. This was also a social revolution. Although the elites led the process, the decisive involvement of many peasants, rural laborers, artisans, urban plebeians, enslaved people, and members of the indigenous communities granted them an opportunity to pursue other goals. The chapter starts with a brief description of the region in late colonial times, and then analyses the imperial crisis in the beginning of the century, the coming of revolution and the war that ensued, the emergence of rival revolutionary projects, the crooked way into independence, and the fall of the revolutionary regimes, which opened a new period.